The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

Sam approached Tom and issued the same warning which he did every time that he was not to accompany the contraband back across the Channel: two hundred barrels, untouched by the pilfering fingers of drunk fishermen, must be landed tonight at Romney Marsh. Then, with half of the crew on-board, Sam climbed into the Nancy and set sail for Folkestone, leaving the rest of the men waiting until darkness to land the goods.

Sam trekked the three-mile journey from Ransley’s house to his own cottage in just under an hour. Having disembarked the Nancy at Folkestone, he had ridden one of Ransley’s horses to the Bourne Tap, confirming that the smuggling run was all set for the night. He now had over three hours until he needed to make his way to the Royal Oak in Newchurch, the meeting place for the two hundred strong men, pulled from the surrounding countryside for tonight’s smuggling run.

‘Daddy!’ John and Ellen yelled, jumping up from their game of spinning tops and hugging his legs.

‘Be a-leaving him, for goodness’ sake,’ Hester said, appearing in the parlour.

‘Did you be going to France, Daddy?’ John asked.

Sam nodded.

‘When I can, can I be coming with you?’ John asked.

‘And me!’ Ellen joined in.

Sam smiled. ‘When you be a bit older.’

‘Not on your life!’ Hester interjected. ‘You be a-getting yourself out on them fields and earning yourself a living blessed by the good Lord.’ John turned his nose up at the idea and returned to spinning the wooden top on the floor. ‘You be back out again tonight?’ Hester asked, a sourness to her question.

‘Aye,’ Sam answered. ‘That be right.’

‘Will you be shooting the preventative men?’ John asked, making his fingers into a pistol and pretending to fire at his mother.

‘Let’s be hoping not.’

‘Be a-stopping that,’ Hester snapped, angrily slapping John’s hands. Her furious eyes met with Sam’s in a look which perfectly conveyed her unspoken thoughts. ‘Ann not be with you?’

‘I bain’t seen her all day. Expect she be having herself a nice time some place,’ he said.

Hester took a step closer to Sam and, with narrowed eyes, spoke to him quietly. ‘What does she be a-doing with all her wages?’

Sam thought for a moment. ‘She be giving us her lodgings—’ he smiled at something that occurred to him, ‘—she be paying my wages.’

‘How in the Lord’s good name do you be a-reckoning a godless black-tan like Ann Fothergill be paying your wages?’

‘She be spending most of her money up at the Bourne Tap, putting money in old Ransley’s purse that he be passing back to me.’

Hester seemed to mull for some time on what he had said. ‘Bain’t you not noticed that she be less… lost in liquor these past months?’

‘I don’t be knowing such things,’ Sam said with a disinterested shrug. In truth, though, now that he thought about it, he was aware that he had seen much less of Ann either at home or at her other favourite haunts, the Walnut Tree Inn and the Bourne Tap. Where she was going and what she was doing with her money, however, he had no idea.

Chapter Seventeen

27th June 1823, Dover, Kent

Ann entered the building on St James’s Street without a trace of the self-consciousness which had been manifest in her first few visits there. She crept into the rear of the grand hall and gave an apologetic nod to Miss Bowler for her seemingly inadvertent premature arrival. It was the same routine every week: she would arrive early, standing at the back with a fixed smile and a look of near boredom, as though she were critical of what went on here, when in fact she was hungrily absorbing whatever lesson Miss Bowler was delivering to the previous class.

‘And so, to the end of the lesson,’ Miss Bowler said in a mock-dramatic tone, holding a book aloft in one hand, as she twirled around at the front of the room to the soft amusement of the dozen or so girls. She drew in a lengthy breath and raised the book. ‘The Universal Epitaph.’ She paused and glanced theatrically around the room before beginning:

‘No flattering praises daub my stone,

My frailties and my faults to hide;

My faults and failings are all known—I liv’d in sin—in sin I died.

And oh! condemn me not, I pray,

You who my sad confession view;

But ask your soul, if it can say, That I’m a viler man than you.’

Miss Bowler snapped the book shut. ‘Good day to you, girls.’

The class murmured their goodbyes and began to file from the room.

Miss Bowler strolled energetically towards Ann, offering her a delightful smile. ‘Ann—welcome.’

‘That were a nice poem, Miss Bowler. I be knowing a fair few folk what could be having that on their graves.’

Miss Bowler grinned. ‘John Clare. A lovely collection entitled Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. Come and sit down,’ Miss Bowler encouraged, pulling out a chair in front of her desk and setting down a clean slate and a fresh piece of white chalk.

Ann sat and marvelled at them, remembering Miss Bowler’s bewildering prattle on her first visit here: ‘Simple geology harnessed for the betterment of humankind,’ she had enthused. ‘What happens when you combine a piece of metamorphic rock—’ here she had picked up the slate, ‘—with a piece of sedimentary rock?’ Then she had picked up the chalk, leaving Ann utterly baffled and wishing that she had not bothered to go there at all. Miss Bowler had smiled at her confusion, which had drawn an irritated flushing to Ann’s cheeks. ‘Literacy. You have the ability to read and write!’ She had then put the chalk to the slate and had drawn a large shape. ‘One letter like this